The cynic suffers the form of faith without love. Incredulity is his piety.

#16

Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear?

#25

The viruses that co-opt the machinery of our cells; the stories we allow to enter and explain us.

#27

If you do everything for one reason, then all you have done will become meaningless when the reason does.

#41

Suppose you had to remember to beat your heart, contract in exact sequence the muscles you use for every step. … Conservatism comes out of the body, the sense of many things being done for us that any attempt to re-think, or even make conscious, would fatally disrupt.

#48

Value yourself according to the burdens you carry, and you will find everything a burden.

#52

Patience is not very different from courage. It just takes longer.

#54

Easier to keep changing your life than to live it.

#55

Reason is the lesser faith that steers us when we have already lost a greater one.

#57

God help my neighbors if I loved them as I love myself.

#64

On what is valuable thieves and the law agree.

#75

The tyrant puts down his own rebellion, everywhere.

#77

The single sin is less of a problem than the good reasons for it.

#84

The great consolation of righteousness is never having to worry whether you’re a bore.

#85

What I’m not changes more than what I am.

#91

Books serve us simply by opening a window on all we wanted to say and feel and think about. We may not even notice that they have not said it themselves till we go back to them years later and do not find what we loved in them. You cannot keep the view by taking the window with you.

#92

A belief is a question we have put aside so we can get on with what we believe we have to do.

#100

So many times I’ve made myself stupid with the fear of being outsmarted.

#105

Those who are too slow to be intelligent deserve our patience, those who are too quick, our pity.

#107

Think of all the smart people made stupid by flaws of character. The finest watch isn’t fine long when used as a hammer.

#108

The first abuse of power is not realizing that you have it.

#112

Greater than the temptations of beauty are those of method.

#114

Only the dead have discovered what they cannot live without.

#120

Often you only have to ask What would I do if I were not afraid?

#121

To think yourself incapable of crime is one failure of the imagination. To think yourself capable of all crimes is another.

#122

There are crimes I don’t commit mainly because I don’t want to find out I could.

#124

The drives were nature’s first provision: thinking was added later, to get us around the world’s obstacles to them.

#126

To me the great divide is between the talkative and the quiet. Do they just say everything that’s on their minds, even before it’s on their minds? Sometimes I think I could just turn up my head like a walkman so what’s going on there could be heard by others. But there would still be a difference. For inside the head they are talking to people like them, and I am talking to someone like me: he is quiet and doesn’t much like being talked at; he can’t conceal how easily he gets bored.

#127

Success is whatever humiliation everyone has agreed to compete for.

#135

The god of many cannot remain the true god.

#138

I’m surprised that multiple personalities are so much less common in reality than in fiction: what a little disorder it would take, a distraction, a sleep, for one of our minor characters to imagine he was the star, to speak out for everyone else. And that’s what it would be, a change of billing, not of authorship. For you do not write your play—you are just the character in it called The Playwright. The real writer, you never meet.

#139

Seizing on a piece of business, I become tiny, eager, efficient: roiled water I cannot see into.

#146

If I do not waste time, I am wasting my time.

#146

The procrastinator dreads beginning, the workaholic, ending.

#147

They say productivity is the key to confidence, and confidence … to productivity. And they’re happy walking back and forth between these two rooms, each the excuse for the other.

#150

I sell my time to get enough money to buy it back.

#151

What did you do today? Nothing say our little children, and so do I. What we most are is what we keep mistaking for nothing.

#155

I’ll buy that means also I believe it.

#157

Your choices: spend, and believe in things; save, and believe in money.

#157

A day is only a day. But a life is only a life.

#163

I don’t know what’s meant by Know thyself, which seems to ask a window to look at a window.

#165

I aspire to know when best to walk or eat, which music I need, and how to keep myself sitting as I am now, stubbornly enraptured with doing practically nothing.

#165

Beware of knowing your virtues; you may lose them. Beware of knowing your vices; you may forgive them.

#166

To practice Sincerity is to burden everyone else with believing you.

#170

To know, you just have to know. To believe, you have to make others believe.

#171

It is clear, we say, as if to see through something were to know it.

#181

A strange gratitude for those I disagree with. They keep me from having to take too seriously the moments when I disagree with myself.

#185

The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.

#195

To condemn your sin in another is hypocrisy. Not to condemn is to reserve your right to sin.

#196

Let me have my dreams but not what I dream of.

#197

Water deepens where it has to wait.

#224

It’s amazing that I sit at my job all day and no one sees me clearly enough to say What is that boy doing behind a desk?

#247

Impatience is not wanting to understand that you don’t understand.

#251

He does not deserve your praise, but he deserves to be treated as if someday he might.

#293

The best way to get people to do what you want is not to be too particular about what you want.

#295

First he gathered what he needed. Then he needed to keep gathering what he used to need.

#314

It is less important to escape pain than to avoid exceptionless rules.

#326

The new gets old much faster than the old gets older.

#348

The man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be.

#349

Envy is ashamed of itself. If it weren’t hanging back, it would go all the way to emulation and love.

#355

Embarrassment is the greatest teacher, but since its lessons are exactly those we have tried hardest to conceal from ourselves, it may teach us, also, to perfect our self-deception.

#373

Any virtue systematically applied becomes a vice. Morality is attention, not system.

#398

I lied. And my embarrassment was so great that I changed everything else to make the lie true.

#403

Say too soon what you think and you will say what everyone else thinks.

#405

The mind is like a well-endowed museum, only a small fraction of its holdings on view at any one time.

#407

I am not unambitious. I am just too ambitious for what you call ambitions.

#412

The first quest or the first love is also the last. The second isn’t.

#427

What’s the difference between provincialism, which unthinkingly takes its situation for everyone’s, and cosmopolitanism, which is confident it has the right to?

#431

Anger has been ready to be angry.

#438

Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.

#440

Judging itself brings the pain of being judged. The wicked judge mistakes this for another crime of the accused and lengthens his sentence.

#441

Hasn’t there … been a little too much zeal in our reproof of children and friends for yielding to the temptations we ourselves find it most difficult to resist? We punish where we can least afford to sympathize. Of all the horrors of the daily news, it seems hardest to imagine the kind of cruelty that is intensified by the pain of its victims, but whenever we feel sympathy would weaken us, we are a little closer to the torturer.

#449

Patience is decisive indecision.

#451

What’s thinking? You live in a grandly appointed house, but spend all your time rummaging around in the attic for any little trinket you hadn’t known was there.

#454

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.